The Difficult Conversations 9/11 Left Behind

I was in a movie theater in Hyderabad, India with my friend Chato when our phones started buzzing. At intermission, we checked them and realized something big was unfolding in New York. Details were sketchy, and my first thought was about my brother and his family, who lived there. We finished the movie as details of the 9/11 attacks emerged.

Living in India at the time, terrorism unfortunately wasn't unfamiliar. Attacks made the front page only when the death toll was large enough to command attention. I had become more desensitized than I realized. Freshly out of college and beginning a consulting career, I was thousands of miles away from New York. Once I knew my brother and his family were safe, my brain initially processed 9/11 much like the “usual” terrorism I had grown accustomed to reading about at home.

Of course, it was anything but usual.

My consulting career soon had me traveling the world, and one reminder of 9/11 followed me through international airports: I found myself "randomly selected for additional screening" far more often than seemed statistically random. I didn't particularly resent it. The system was trying, imperfectly, to keep people safe in a world confronting a different kind of threat.

Not long afterward, I came to the United States. Living here brought me closer to the trauma of 9/11 and something I hadn't fully understood from India: the shock and vulnerability created by an attack of that magnitude on American soil.

The response reshaped the world. Fighting terrorism received enormous emphasis and new resources, and the United States fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with consequences still debated today. Twenty-five years later, the terrorism that produced 9/11 no longer dominates our sense of global threat as it once did.

My identity changed too. In 2016, I became an American citizen. But some questions exposed by 9/11 remain. Extremism, immigration, integration, Islam, and liberal democratic values continue to generate difficult debates and shape politics in India, Europe and the United States.

Legitimate concerns about immigration, extremism, and integration can easily become suspicion of entire communities. The opposite temptation is to avoid difficult questions altogether. Neither path serves us particularly well.

Social media has made it easier to retreat among people who confirm what we already believe, and artificial intelligence can personalize that information even further, allowing each of us to increasingly inhabit our own version of reality. We risk being left with two choices: engage mostly with people who confirm or amplify our biases, or avoid difficult conversations for fear of being misunderstood or vilified simply for having them.

Twenty-five years ago, I watched a tragedy thousands of miles away without understanding how profoundly it would shape the world I was about to enter. Since then, I have become an immigrant, an American citizen and an elected official.

What I've learned is surprisingly simple: diverse societies require difficult conversations. We have to get past our discomfort and get better at having them.